SIO443: Dr. Jo Boaler Tried To Improve Math Education. Then An Anti-woke Mob Came For Her

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:15 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 443. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and got a fascinating one for you today. You know, this almost could have been a Where There's Woke because Dr. Jo Boaler is a mathematician who has lit the right wing on fire by trying to make make improvements to math education. Also having her on to talk about her new book, Math-ish. We'll get into that.

Yeah, there's a big controversy around some math guidelines, and wouldn't you know it, Chris Rufo is involved, and so therefore, it's nonsense. So excited to speak to Dr. Boaler about the situation, about her new book, and about another attempt to discredit an educator as seen happen so many times. That'll come right after this break. If you like the show, if you want to support the show, and if you wanna avoid hearing ads, please go to patreon.com/seriouspod. A pledge.

We really appreciate our patrons who do, and we really hope you enjoy not having hear ads and getting some extras. So thank you so much. And after this break, we will get to the interview with Dr. Jo Boaler. Dr. Jo Boaler, thanks for joining us today.

0:01:22 Jo: You for having me.

0:01:23 Thomas: Yeah, I'm you've been a bit busy. I'm Sure you've got lots to do these days. I'm I'm going to talk about that. But how are you feeling? Most importantly.

0:01:29 Jo: Absolutely. Am I feeling? I feel as though I am living in two different worlds where I'm providing all these free resources for educators and they love them and I get lots of feedback about how great they are for students and And I am being torn apart in social media by a movement to discredit me. So it couldn't be more contrasting. I have a new book coming out in about three weeks. And at same time, I'm talking to journalists about the attacks on me. So it's very odd. I, it's not boring. No.

0:02:08 Thomas: Not boring. I guess you're not bored. Yeah, this is I mean, these kind of attacks are things that I focused on on several different of my shows. And it really is just incredible how organized it is, right? I mean, it's like, I don't know if they all go to meetings or something, but it just seems like, yeah, right.

0:02:23 Jo: Yeah. Oh, they do. Actually, One of them published an article recently talking about how they forced the resignation of the Harvard president and their strategy they use, where they get a team of people to write up all of the false accusations and submit them anonymously. They then work to get it amplified in social media, they have funding, they a large amount of money that's supporting them, and he just wrote it all out and how they use that to get Claudine Gay to resign, and now they're using it on other faculty and universities. Rufo,

0:02:57 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:08 Thomas: Definitely Chris Rufo. Yeah, he he it's incredible how self -aware he seems to be because he'll just write like, well, here's the bullshit we're doing, everybody. It's definitely bullshit.

0:03:16 Jo: It's kind of helpful for actually

0:03:18 Thomas: Yeah. It's weird. Yeah well, why don't we start with well, unpleasant stuff your new book and maybe a little bit of your background so much to talk about there. There. You talk about math -ish and kind of the inspiration for it? And

0:03:19 Jo: Sure Yeah, well, math ish has lots of ideas in it that come from research and learning and neuroscience about how we should be learning maths with visuals and models and building really firm models in our brains of different ideas. But the actual idea of ish, I'm very excited about. Out. So what I know is that when students do calculations and teachers will say this all the time, they get lost inside the numbers. They lose all sense of what the numbers should be.

They're calculating and their number sense is gone. And teachers say to me, what do we do about this? How do we help them? So my solution in this book is to always ask students before they do a calculation to work out the ish numbers, what would you think it would be, ish, and what happens when they do that is they keep their mind at this conceptual level, it's super helpful for them.

But the reason I'm really excited about it now is I've started talking about this at conferences, and I got an email from a teacher in December saying, oh my gosh, I went back to my sixth grade class and I asked them to ish members, and it totally changed the environment of the classroom. These, these kids who are always sent to the principal's office because they hate math and they don't engage, we're all sharing their ish numbers. And it's made the classroom so much more inclusive.

It's taken away kids' fear. So it's really like this lovely win -win situation where it helps kids conceptually, but it's also helps take away the fear of maths for students. So I'm super excited about it, and the more I got into ish, the more, the more I started to ish everything and see how it's really a good thing to use in your life, and there's lots of things you can ish, and it's really helpful. In fact, I wanted to write a whole other book after that book, after the book I've written, that's all about ish, but

0:05:38 Thomas: You're already on your next book. You haven't even released this one yet. Well, that's some folks are like that, I guess. I don't know if I'll ever write one book, let alone multiple.

0:05:38 Jo: Yeah, I know it's not even come out yet Well,

0:05:49 Thomas: Yeah. Well, actually, I was just going to ask a basic question. You mentioned sixth grade, but yeah, what levels are you most focused on? Kind of what ages are, are you more focused on this kind of thing?

0:05:57 Jo: We Have a website called u-cubed, and we share lessons and videos for students and all sorts of resources, and it really goes out from kindergarten all the way up to college. Um, we go across the grades. I think we have, our biggest following is probably teachers in the 3-8 grade span. High school teachers find it really hard to change what, what they're doing for various reasons, but we have a very big following from the sort of 3-8 grades, and they use our lessons that we've shared, and they love them, the kids love them, and we've made all these videos to help kids know how their brains work and how they can learn anything, that there's no such thing as a math person, and

0:05:57 Thomas: Oh, Wow. Oh, That's interesting. Oh, we should talk about that, because I, I was just going to say, I, I, I have always been that kind of math person, like that's the only subject that has always just, I've liked, and it's come easily and it's, and so I, it's kind of interesting to be on, weird though, as a kid, like most people, it seems like, aren't like that. It seems like, so the most people you talk to have that sort of fear of math, or ah, I don't understand, I'm never going to use this, it's not going to be whatever. And I was wondering if you could talk about kind of on a background level, what led you to want to, you do this kind of work and reach that kind of audience of people who maybe aren't the typical quote unquote math kid.

0:06:51 Jo: That's Good. No, No. Well, I started my career as a teacher in London, and I had learned a lot of the ideas I still share today from the teacher education program at London University. And I saw firsthand how much it helped kids.

Actually, one of my very first teaching assignments was to teach the bottom set, as we say in England, but you would call it a track here, and the kids were 13, they'd just been put into this bottom group, and I still remember, I walked into the room and the first question from one of the 13 year olds was, why should we bother? And I really struggled to answer that because I knew they were in this low group, they were destined to get low grades.

In England, if if you're in the lower groups, you cannot get anything above a D in the national exam. And just decided there and then, I was going to teach them all the higher level work. And so they all end up doing really well. And that had real life consequences for these kids, because they were able to pass maths, which is really important in the UK. And from there, go on to, you better jobs and college options.

So that was start, my, the of my career, and then I decided to, you know, go into academia and do a master's degree and a PhD, and I, many other maths educators know that there are better ways to teach than the ways we currently have in schools, and when you've seen how well it works, and you've got so much evidence of how well it works, you really, well, I've really, it really makes me want to get it to lots more people.

0:08:57 Thomas: Why do you think it isn't? I mean, I guess there's also a question of obviously this podcast is going to Be America centric, though, maybe not as much as you might think. But I I certainly don't know anything about how education works in other countries, barely know how it works here. Why do you think it's, the case where it's techniques seem to be, you known, but not utilized.

0:09:16 Jo: Why is a really good question. In lots of classrooms, it really does look pretty much how it looked in the 1800s, with the teacher standing at the front explaining methods and students sitting in desks.

0:09:28 Thomas: Yikes. Don't even think we had discovered all the numbers back then. That can't be good.

0:09:33 Jo: That's not the best way. But really hard to change. So one problem I always see is all of the research about good ways of teaching is locked up in academic journals, teachers don't read those nowadays, they you can't have to pay to get them and they're full of academic jargon, so one of the things that inspired us to start YouCubed was to take all of that academic research and translate it into lessons for students.

I know teachers don't have time to read lots of scientific articles, so we said, what, what we take what we know, what would it look like in a lesson we design, so it's been um successful, we get half a million teachers coming to our website every month and they're using the lessons and they see how engaged their kids are, how they're getting these great connections, but getting it more widespread, I was a writer for the California Maths Framework.

And if you've heard anything about the California Maths Framework, it was probably negative because there was a whole media campaign against it. Amazing, really, just putting some of the ideas we know from research into a document that's not even, uh, it's just advice for schools, caused so much pushback, and the people pushing back, they didn't have a single idea for something better, they just wanted to keep it the same and

0:09:38 Thomas: Yeah.

0:11:07 Jo: Have a system where two-thirds of kids are failing in maths but they They want it to stay the same.

0:11:06 Thomas: Yeah. We Yeah. So we better keep it the same. You don't want to, you know, change anything there just in case because we've got such a good thing going. It's It's the definition of reactionary, I think, right? I mean, it's just so many things we're saying today.

0:11:18 Jo: Yeah, it is. It is the definition of reactionary.

0:11:24 Thomas: I hadn't heard of that specific program before, of course, doing research for this. But one thing I think a lot of people are familiar with in this country is Common Core. Is that at all related to anything you do? Because I know that had the same kind of reaction.

0:11:39 Jo: It did have the same pushback. And the Common Core was sort of a rewrite of the standards. And that came out in 2013, I think, 11 years ago now. Were some good changes, but also met with huge pushback, so it's framework is not changing standards, that's the other thing that's so amazing, that there was so much pushback, it's not even changing the standards that students are doing, it's just ideas for teaching, but I think when it comes to maths it serves the rich and wealthy in this country. It's a form of social capital where they know how to get their kids ahead.

And they don't want that system to change. I was invited to a lunch party recently of some sort of Silicon Valley elite who are doing good work in other countries. And while I was there, the organizer, she was crying when she was talking to me. And she said, "I couldn't believe it. I had CEOs of companies say they wouldn't come to this lunch because you are here." And "you are threatening their child's pathway into college." And how are we threatening their child's path into college? We're trying to open up math so more kids can be successful and

0:12:03 Thomas: Yeah.

0:12:43 Thomas: What? Wow. And again, for over guidelines over just like, hey, here's something that might help. It's wow.

0:13:04 Jo: Yeah, and their guidelines, right? Yes, that too, right?

0:13:09 Thomas: Wow. It is amazing, too, because of how like would be one thing if all of those people were, I don't know, famous mathematicians or something. But like it's it's a bunch of other people who probably weren't good at math and don't you know, like there's strikes me that this, I guess, is going to be a tough crowd either way, because it's like either you have people who maybe they were good at mass, so they feel like they know better or something or people who weren't. Good. So they just don't, they don't understand it. Then they're mad about it.

0:13:33 Thomas: I guess that seems to be the world we live in.

0:13:20 Jo: Yeah, Yeah, Right, it is a tough crowd, you're right, and we do have both of those people, so mean, I explain this to people because they often have noticed this, but maths is kind of built in the U.S. to be very inequitable. Calculus sits as the course at the top of high school that's really valued, but there are more courses in front of calculus than there are years of high school, so that has moved algebra into to middle school, and middle school's sort of setting up two tracks to work out who can do algebra early and who can't. Those decisions are often made using data from elementary school. So nobody knows this, but these little kids are taking tests in fourth and fifth grade that literally are going to decide their whole life, because what happens effectively is we push kids out at every level. So only 16% of students in the US take calculus in high school, and the racial breakdown of those kids would terrify you.

0:13:35 Thomas: Yeah. That's so frustrating.

0:14:35 Thomas: Yeah, it's

0:14:36 Jo: So that system, that inequitable system has been in place for generations, and nobody wants that. Well, these people who are against change don't want that system to change. I

0:14:48 Thomas: So sad. Want I to make sure before we move on from math -ish, it sounds so interesting. And I was wondering if are there any like little tangible examples of what you mean of that kind of technique that people could, you grab hold of and be able to understand a little better?

0:15:01 Jo: Was in high schools yesterday and the students were in these classes and they were given systems of equations. You probably remember them. So like 7x plus 2y is 12 and 1y minus 3y. And they had all these sets of simultaneous equations. And I'm thinking to myself as I watch these kids, why would any of them care about the answer to this?

0:15:12 Thomas: No kidding.

0:15:25 Jo: These are, you know, 21st century young people. You could have them looking at a data set of real environmental factors that actually work together, and you can analyze them using a simultaneous equation. You can work out sort of the best ways of having these different environmental factors, or, you know, animals are all in systems where if you have too many of that animal, the other animal dies out. And there's lots of real world uses of mathematics. And kids could be working on projects where they're learning to use a tool like equation tool that helps them understand more about their data. They would be fascinated by that. They're not fascinated by two abstract algebraic expressions. And I could see that. I was walking around the room with the kids saying, okay, do you know what to do? And they're I'm just like, no, staring at the board. And I was like, well, how do you think you could solve this? What ideas do you have? And they're like, nothing.

0:16:17 Thomas: Yeah Yeah.

0:16:31 Thomas: There's got to be a better way. There has to be a better Way. Yeah. Yeah, right.

0:16:35 Jo: And I feel bad for the teachers because they have the books that teach it in that way.

0:16:41 Jo: And that's what the standards look like, just lots and lots of abstract procedures. And so we have the system we have. There are teachers who are doing amazing work completely, completely differently to that, and the kids are engaged and they're doing well. Um, we need it to get to more teachers. Yeah.

0:17:00 Thomas: And we pay those teachers, you know, a dollar an hour. So I'm sure it's very inspirational For them to get. Yeah, there's so many things working against it. But yeah, that, that's interesting because again, I did love that stuff as a kid. However, I also think that like, I, I did have a hard time. It usually was because of something being really detached from any practical example, you know.

And one thing I've noticed in, in, I, I have two young kids now, and I'm, I've, you know, tried to get my uh little girl started on math stuff because I just love it so much, I just kind of will bring up mathematical stuff if it comes up in everyday life. And one things I've noticed in her, and as you know, she's six, so, but, but I noticed that it is harder for kids to kind of grasp that big picture.

And in my own life, when I've had the pleasure of needing to use some math for something, like, you know, they always say you never use it for anything. And it's kind of true, honestly, if you just, your average career or whatever. But I always look for it in those times when I have been able to use, you know, any sort of advanced mathematical concepts to do my job or do something interesting or programming or whatever, it's always been so fun. And I've noticed as an adult that I'm way more, and in the real world, you're way more big picture first. You know, you

0:17:04 Jo: Yeah. Right.

0:18:14 Thomas: Are just going to be, all right, here is the problem I have. Here are the things.

0:18:14 Jo: That's Right. That's That's right. And how can I... Right.

0:18:19 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And it is really interesting to come at it from that angle and be like, oh, this makes so much more sense. And, it is easier to learn and it is easy to teach if you are coming from like, yeah, this is what this does. Not let's start off with the minuscule variables and exactly the technique to isolate X and all that stuff. It really does seem to make a huge difference.

0:18:40 Jo: Exactly. Well, this lesson started yesterday with the teacher saying, we're going to be doing systems of equations. And I she was saying that, like, you know, in the real world, nobody says to you, this is a systems of equation, use it. You have to figure that out. That's part of the important part of maths, like, what, what do I use here, what would help me here? But in maths class, we don't, we take that away from kids and we just give them the method and tell them to use it. So yeah, if your daughter's six, I recommend you coming to our u-cubed website and giving her some of our fun activities. I of the work we're doing, and it's also in the book, is something that I, I think people don't realize, which is the importance of number flexibility for young children. Turns out thinking flexibly about numbers is actually what separates low from high achieving students.

0:18:49 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, right.

0:19:16 Thomas: Will do. That's awesome. Is there anything else about math -ish that you want to tell listeners about?

0:19:41 Thomas: Does that mean exactly?

0:19:42 Jo: San Jose recently, and we wanted to redo a study that was done years ago to see if it's still held. And we give kids number problems. So they were in grades, grades one to five, and we gave them problems like 19 plus six. And then we monitored their strategies. And we had asked teachers to nominate their three highest and their three lowest achieving students. So all of the low achieving students use counting.

So the lowest sort of strategy is they had counters, they would put out 19 counters, that put out six counters, they'd count all of them, or slightly more developed, they'd say, okay, 19, and then I count on, 20, 21. The high achieving students would say things like, 19 plus 6, I'm instead going to answer 20 plus 5. So that's a flexible use of numbers, where you can break them apart and use them in different ways, and it is the opposite of what kids get when they're, with drilled, timed math facts, where they think numbers are very rigid. And what we've found is kids knowing that they can use numbers in that flexible way is actually what puts them on a path to high achievement. We're working to really help teachers know about that and get it out there. Yeah.

0:20:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:03 Thomas: It does sound like that was some of what the common core stuff was that people got mad about, right?

0:21:07 Jo: Yeah, sharing different approaches. Yeah. Yeah.

0:21:11 Thomas: Yeah, and I do see that in some of Phoebe's math homework, where I'm like, well, it's so interesting, because I look at that, and it'll be like, find the tens that are, you know, it's trying to put that into words, essentially. And I look and I'm, like, I didn't do this. But that place where you're, like... So, therefore, it must be evil. I just don't understand that. It's like, okay, let's, yeah.

0:21:26 Jo: Yeah. Right. Right, right. I don't understand that either, but that's

0:21:36 Thomas: But it seems to make a difference. I mean, it is the kind of thing that I think maybe some kids naturally did. I know I would do that a lot in my mind. And the thing is, I would be like, I don't know. I would, I think I wasn't doing it the best way. It would have been really good, even though it was something I like to do, kind of play with numbers in my head. I think I was doing it more for fun than, you know, I don't think I did it in the most efficient ways and actually having it be a part of the lesson, I'm sure would have made it a huge difference for me.

0:21:36 Jo: Where we are.

0:22:00 Jo: And probably, I mean, I was like you as a kid too, and I just liked maths and I liked playing with the numbers. I do think probably though that kids like that who are successful, successful do start to kind of mess about with numbers more and get more of a sort of feel for numbers from doing that kind of work. The other thing that I share in my book, and that's really important, is we now know that seeing maths visually is super important. This is really important for your daughter. And our brain, there are actually five different pathways that can process mathematical ideas. Two of them are visual pathways, they're at the back of the head. And when you think visually about maths, it causes different parts of the brain to develop.

They've actually found when they study the brains of mathematicians and compare them with the brains of other academics that what's different about them is the active visual pathways when they do maths. So a lot of our things on our website and in my new book are showing how we can approach maths visually. How can you multiply with visuals and divide with visuals and do fractions with visual.

All of that can be visual and it's much more engaging for kids and also kind of gets them to see the creativity in maths. We encourage kids to come up with their own ways of visualizing mathematical ideas, and it really, you know, helps a lot of students in many ways.

0:22:14 Thomas: Mm -hmm.

0:23:28 Thomas: Yeah. And it seems like, like when and I've learned about the really interesting, I don't know, proofs or concepts problems that it's like, oh, no one solved this until someone did. Often there's very visual components to it, right? It's like it's pattern recognition and it's stuff that it yeah, it's

0:23:34 Jo: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And having Ways to visualize those patterns. I mean, the really high level cutting edge work that's going on in Silicon Valley now is visual. People have this myth in the education system that kids should start with visuals and then get to abstract maths, which is a higher level, but that's not true. In fact, any high level maths that's going on now in the world, it's more likely to be visual than it is numerical. So It's, it's really interesting.

0:24:09 Thomas: So interesting. Like, the or something. They already did all the, like scratching the numbers and the stuff into the scratch pad, I guess. The low -hanging math fruit anything that solidified your love of math? I'm always curious. Was there a particular problem or example or something?

0:24:14 Jo: Yes.

0:24:28 Jo: That's a good question. Well, I grew up in England and the teachers were pretty boring. They would put methods on the board and I would go, go through books, answering them. And I was good at maths, but I wasn't really excited by it. And I thought I'd go into science. To go into science, you often take maths A level, which is the higher level course that you take when you're 17 or 18, and includes a lot of calculus and other things. But in that course, I had a teacher who was different. And what she did was she would, would put up these problems and tell us to sit in groups and discuss them. And that just changed maths for me. Suddenly we were sharing ideas and drawing things and it changed what I thought about maths. It changed what I thought about myself. And that was what allowed me to think, oh, I could do more of this. And that was definitely a turning point for me. I think if I'd continued with the teacher just lecturing at me, I never would have gone into maths as a career.

0:25:32 Thomas: Yeah. I was the same way. Well, for ADHD reasons, but if a teacher was just talking... I mean, sometimes math was the one place I could pay attention just because I was so interested in it, but any other subject, it was just like, nah, I can't. I'm gone. I're not even in the world anymore. Well that's so fun. I am excited for the book. We'll put the link in the show notes for that. And I'm excited to go to the website with Phoebe and check that out. But maybe we should talk a little bit more about, I don't know, the awful reactionary campaign against your Chex Notes helpful guide that you're putting up for the optional guide.

0:26:05 Jo: Optional Guide, yes.

0:26:08 Thomas: Do You lock up people if they don't follow your, your math fascism Or yeah, How did this start? Where did this all, what's the inciting incident on this? Wow.

0:26:08 Jo: Yeah. That's What we do, yeah. Oh, Tell you when it started. So I did a study in England over where I followed kids through different high school approaches for three years in different schools, one where they, they sort of lectured to the traditional model. And in the other one, they worked on projects, were also in mixed achievement groups. And everybody sort of took the work to whatever level they were working at. And it was that school where the kids did significantly better, even national exams, which were nothing like the projects they worked on. So then I moved to the U.S. That study won awards in the UK. It was really a big deal. And I moved the U.S. I was recruited. To come to Stanford, immediately, a very traditional mathematician called me to his office and said, don't talk about that study in the US. Teachers are too stupid to be able to teach in those ways. He said this to me.

0:27:09 Jo: And I was like, okay, left his office and then did a study in the US to see, well, is it similar here? Again, this time we followed kids over four years in different high schools. And again, the kids who were in the high school where everybody started with the same class in ninth grade and then they went off in different directions and the maths was more about building and communicating, they did better. And when that result came out, he accused me of academic misconduct to bring the research down. Stanford was forced to look into it because that's the sort of law. They said there's no case here. They shut the investigation. And he then started publishing on websites. And they said things like, I made up data.

0:27:09 Thomas: Are

0:28:02 Jo: But really why they were so upset about my two studies was the detracking part, is not what they want for kids in the US. They don't want them being together in the same classes. That was, again, also part of the big pushback about the framework, we said we've got to stop putting kids on these different pathways in elementary school, it's not fair, it's not productive. They hated that. So they see me as a big problem, because I actually have data. One of them wrote on a website, this is the worst possible scenario, a researcher in a top university, with data um.

0:28:44 Thomas: We In present day here, or were you talking way back When, or yeah, When Did, yeah

0:28:46 Jo: So Weird Present Day So That That, when it first happened to me, this was in like 2009 or something. I was so just by all of these things. I'd moved back to England, but this is just ridiculous. And anyway, Stanford got me to come back and I, I had a great dean when I came back, Claude Steel, and we shared the what had happened and I got a lot of support and I was like, okay, good, that's past me, and was fine.

We produced the website, we have millions of teachers coming to it, and books. Then I became a writer for the California maths framework, and it all comes back again. These same people saying, your, your research is not valid. And what they really hate is our materials are used in a lot of schools. So were other writers of the framework who they didn't go after. It was me they chose to be the target because, I mean, I'm a threat, to be honest.

And they think if they can bring me down, then our materials won't be used in schools. Then maybe the framework will fall. They have a lot of reasons to go after me, but um, I just got an email this morning asking me to go and work in a university in Australia, and I was like, oh, that does, does sound kind of appealing right now.

0:28:48 Thomas: Yeah

0:30:11 Jo: Pretty sure This Doesn't happen in Austrailia

0:30:11 Thomas: Well, you Know I Don't know, that's where Rupert Murdoch came from, right?

0:30:15 Jo: He did.

0:30:16 Thomas: There's Like everywhere has their reactionaries, but yeah. Yeah. It sounds so kind of out of nowhere though. Was it, do you think there's a, like a personal component to it? Just that way you described that first teacher. It's just like, so weird, you know?

0:30:16 Jo: Yeah See, so what they've said on the internet is, we're stopping kids taking algebra. If you look on X, you'll see that I have stopped kids in California taking Algebra, what they're referring to, actually, all kids take algebra, it's a legal requirement, everybody takes algebra. Algebra um, ever said anything different to algebra two, which is the next, you kids taking the third year, we had said what the UCs had already said years before, which is we could have different maths options for kids, maybe they take data science instead. We had talked about the importance of data science, so this is a big part of what they're against, kids taking data science in high school, and they think all kids should take algebra too, and I personally have torn algebra from the hands of children across California, apparently, so They Really twist what is happening and get these little catchphrases like, you know, no algebra, and get people to agree with them, other traditional STEM people, and then they have a movement, but

0:30:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:38 Thomas: And I'm sure these same people were the same people who were like, we're never going to use this. Never going to Use this at all. And then all of a sudden they can, they can switch. They really can't turn on a dime for different stuff. No, it's the algebra. You you have to take, kidding me? You all have to take it. And it's like, yeah, Uh-huh. But what was the thinking behind Algebra 2? Was it that maybe some people, because I remember the Algebra 3 thing being on that firm track to calculus, which was always my goal, you yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Is that the thinking, like, okay, maybe if you're not on that track to calculus, maybe something else might

0:31:43 Jo: I Know They Were The Right, yeah. Really, algebra 2 is a course for kids who are taking calculus, but Most kids don't take calculus, maybe.

0:32:15 Thomas: Be more useful. Yeah, sure. That makes sense to me.

0:32:15 Jo: There's something more useful, yeah, exactly. And it, what was happening was kids were taking data science in year three and then maybe following it up with statistics, AP stats, so they're on more of a data stats pathway. Um, they're, they're shutting that down. They're got the UCs to eliminate data science. So they really going at all these different innovative new practices in education and trying to shut them down. No,

0:32:41 Thomas: Just seems like a lot of work for the the, the wrong, I don't know how they get it so it inspired. I at least get the mechanics of what's happening when it's grade school kids. And because that gets a bunch of, you know, I Don't know, run of the mill conservative parents mad or even may, who knows, maybe some liberal parents mad. But when it comes to you talk about you sees, like, I, IDon't know. Interesting that there's this reactionary movement all the way up to that level trying to prevent, hmm.

0:32:45 Jo: I don't either. Well, here's the, a really scary interpretation, interpretation of this. We have a system at the moment where only some kids are getting to the high level. And actually, if you have money, you can make that be your kid, because you can hire tutors, and it's all about memorization, and you can push them there. And they know, these parents, to get their kids on those higher, and they work to make that happen. Now, along comes this course in data science that any kid can take, it's blowing up the hierarchy that's been in the system for so long, and kids can take data science and they then go on to stats and they can go to college. So it's really working to open up pathways to more diverse kids, and honestly it seems that there are people who don't want that.

0:34:00 Thomas: Yeah, that's been the constant, gosh, for who knows how long, the constant just quandary, just the problem, the unanswerable question in my mind is like, okay, are they just dumb or are they diabolical? Like, is there, you know, how much forethought is there in this? And

0:34:12 Jo: I I'm more, more and more thinking the diabolical, cool, mixed with some dumb. That's

0:34:17 Thomas: Interesting. Well, that's the thing. It's like, yeah, be someone at some level with a certain goal. And then, you lot of other people can latch on for different reasons. But that is a scary thought. Yeah, that is so sad. Well the latest state in this. I know this is almost like a developing story as of you know now. Right. I mean it's ongoing. Right?

0:34:27 Jo: Right, that's right, yeah, It is. So the framework unanimously passed in July of last year. It was backed by the California Teachers Association, or the state board, so these guys who campaigned against it effectively lost and the framework went forward. So I thought, okay, good, it's over, they'll stop abusing me on social media, and it seemed okay for a few months.

And then, out of the blue, three weeks ago, I get an email from a reporter at the Free Beacon saying that she'd received an anonymous report of academic misconduct, and that there were, it was a hundred page report, 52 studies that are misused in the, the framework, which, you know, was a group of people, anyway, not me, but, um, this 100 page report, which I've now unfortunately had to go through, only talks about 15 studies, eight of them are that question the use of timed math fact tests, and they just don't like that, they don't like the fact they're questioned, so they say they don't like the research, not my research, it's somebody else's research, and in this hundred page report they make this argument about a paper, paper, and then it's cut and pasted three times.

0:34:36 Thomas: Right?

0:35:55 Jo: Really bizarre. So, this is how they get their hundred pages. And anyway, the Free Beacon, Republican, publishes this. It gets picked up by some pretty influential right wing players on social media, they, a lot of people on social media who like to see a professor at a university be trashed. And it says that there's anonymous, there is an accusation of scientific misconduct. So Elon Musk retweeted it. Ted Ted Cruz retweeted it.

0:35:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep God.

0:36:26 Thomas: The best and brightest math

0:36:28 Jo: Now I've got all of these right-wing lunatics on social media telling me I need to go to prison and I should die.

0:36:36 Thomas: Prison or real prison.

0:36:38 Jo: Real prison.

0:36:39 Thomas: Oh no.

0:36:40 Jo: There is such a thing as math prison. It's funny you say that. But Yeah, that's where I am. And there was a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education who we know was working with the people opposed to the framework immediately reprinted this shoddy piece of reporting in the Free Beacon, no questions asked, no checking of it, just put it in the Chronicle. So

0:36:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:05 Thomas: They really count on people not reading the stuff, like crazy.

0:37:09 Jo: And I'm living in that. Now I've got millions of people against me on social media. I've got teachers kind of standing up for me and trying to push back, but it's a pretty odd and scary situation. Yeah.

0:37:25 Thomas: Just the worst. It really is like everything I can't stand against everything that I think is good, which is, you know, critical thinking. And it doesn't mean that people aren't capable of making mistakes in any of these situations, but it's the idea of this kind of thoughtless mass just being guided by a few ringleaders who tell them what to hate. And, oh, It's a 100-page report and there's all these things. It's the same when they went after, is Claudine Gay, is you the same situation where when you actually break down the alleged stuff and

0:37:46 Jo: Right. Yeah. Is And Now they're doing that with other Black DEI faculty at Harvard, three women, it's all or women that they're doing this with. Higher Education have just written an article linking those attacks on those women to what's happening with me, all sort of DEI related. All the same playbook, anonymous accusations, share it on social media, get hung, drawn and quartered by the court of X. And then they send it to the institution. Yeah.

0:38:05 Thomas: They're Often pressured into you doing know something which is the

0:38:33 Jo: And Then the institution, that's right, they're like, oh, we have to make we have to look like we're taking this seriously because the world out there is waiting. So it's really awful. And of course it takes me away from my regular work, which is probably what they want. And yeah, of people say, how can this be happening in maths education? That's

0:38:35 Thomas: Frustrating. Part of it, yeah. Yeah.

0:38:55 Thomas: Well, there, there is this like caricature they do where it's like people are trying to teach that math is racist, and you know, that kind of thing.

0:39:01 Jo: One of the things they say. Because we talked in the framework about bringing real situations into maths, and we talked about how there are really important equity issues to be tackled in maths, because look who's going forward. It's not equitable. And so it got the tag of woke maths. And here we are.

0:39:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:25 Thomas: What is woke math? I

0:39:26 Jo: What is woke maths?

0:39:27 Thomas: Mean, what yeah I, yeah, well, I, it's, it's so, it's so frustrating because these things are very pervasive and they do appeal even to moderates, which worries me, where people think there's this new lefty woke something that's trying to teach kids that numbers, you know, two plus two might not be four and just stuff that's like, you know, how, okay, I have you, one of the wokest, one OF the woke math people, does two plus plus two still equal four? Are we changing position on that? Okay.

0:39:36 Jo: Mm Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's Right, that's right Two plus Two does equal four, yes. Mm. Mm-hm.

0:39:59 Thomas: Is the two racist? Are there any comments on, you know, it's just like, what is this based on?

0:40:00 Jo: The Two is not racist. Numbers are not racist. Oh, I know, it, you couldn't have dreamt this up. Really. I couldn't have dreamt of this up, but they do a good job of tagging these things in these ways. This is equity math, this is rote math, because it's, we might be having a maths conversation about real things in the world. So

0:40:05 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

0:40:26 Thomas: Is it as simple as that? I mean, is there anything else that they're latching onto that they think is like this woke rewrite of math? I'm just curious. Like, what is,

0:40:34 Jo: Definitely the you're-stopping-our-kids-go-ahead argument, you're dropping kids, take algebra too, your kids advancing fast through all the courses. It's interesting to me how this is politicized, actually, that people who want this very traditional system of math teaching and they want kids to be able to race through really fast quickly even if they don't understand it, um, conservative people.

0:41:02 Thomas: Well, Honestly, I think maybe that I can do a little bit of translating for my fellow Americans or something, because I think what might be happening is I think that might be an underlying belief among conservatives that if people of color are not doing as well in math, that there's something wrong with them. And so these, these attempts that people like you are making to actually maybe maybe try to understand what the issues could be and fix them. That, in their mind, that's like, well, you just don't like that this objectively correct system is producing these unequal results, and therefore it's why they're always convinced that you're doing something wrong academically, like your studies are going to be bogus, because in their mind, they're so certain that they're, I, that mean, honestly, they're just racist. They're certain that IQ, you differences between racial groups, and anything to the contrary is just because of political correctness. You I do think that's kind of the underlying dynamic that motivates a lot of this.

0:41:02 Jo: Mm. -hmm That's Interesting. Mm.

0:41:55 Jo: That's Right, yeah. I do think that, in fact, I saw on Twitter, just X, just yesterday, somebody saying Jo Boaler has destroyed education. And this person said, how could you say that, she was one person in a whole group, and why, why are you saying this? And they wrote, she's written in a book that there's no such thing as a math person. So I was like, huh, this is what's deeply upset them, that what I say is, you know, everybody's brain is growing and changing all the time, there is no cut off where you're a math person, you're, you're not a math person, and brains are growing and changing. Anybody can learn high levels of maths and that's a message they don't want. You're exactly right. I think in your thinking about it, it, this is what my studies have shown, that black and brown kids could do really well in maths when the teaching changed.

0:42:22 Thomas: Interesting.

0:42:49 Thomas: No way. Yeah. It's just so sad and frustrating. Well, leave it there, yeah? I mean, that seems to be, unfortunately, you seem to still be in the middle of the story. And obviously, we're all pulling for you.

0:42:59 Jo: I am in the middle of the story. Thank

0:43:02 Thomas: It's not, this isn't something in the past tense, right? I mean you're still day to day, yeah. So that sucks.

0:43:02 Jo: You. No. Know, yeah. Current day. Organized.

0:43:09 Thomas: I wish we had a better way to fight this on a systemic level because they just are so organized and they just swarm, you know?

0:43:14 Jo: And wealthy, so Yeah, people will listen to this and come and help me, well.

0:43:16 Thomas: Yeah. How can they help you? Do you want to, is there anything you would point, in addition to your book coming out, Math-ish, of course, is there anything else you'd like to point people to?

0:43:29 Jo: I'm contactable, I'm at Stanford, and um, I think if people come and see what we are putting out there and look at the YouCubed website and the different things on there, they'll see how positive it is. And there's lots of ways people can help. They can reach out and help.

0:43:44 Thomas: Excellent. Yeah. We'll definitely put that in the show notes.

0:43:46 Jo: And Mathish is coming out on May 7th. Also a new website that we've made, mathish.org, where there's going to be a video of kids ishing maths. I haven't put the video up yet, but it's really fun. You should really check out that video.

0:44:00 Thomas: Yeah, for sure. Right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. And we'll put all those links in the show nuts and encourage everyone to check them out.

0:44:08 Jo: Thank you. It's been an interesting chat.

0:44:10 Thomas: Absolutely, perfect. Right. So, actually coming in at the end here with some good news, because since we recorded, Stanford has now closed the review into this bullshit complaint on Dr. Jo Boaler. It was, of course, an anonymous complaint, pages, as we talked about. The university, quote, "has reviewed the matter and has concluded that no formal process is needed and the allegations reflect scholarly disagreement and interpretation," end quote.

I still think that's pretty weak because we need to actually, I wish our institutions, and this is just me speaking, we haven't spoken to Dr. Boaler since then. But wish our institutions would go further and not even legitimize these bullshit attacks and make clear in their press statements that these are bullshit attacks. And it's not merely some scholarly disagreement. It's not a scholarly disagreement, actually. So that's a little frustrating.

However, it is really good news that the complaint was dismissed and that Stanford has concluded there's no need to investigate further. So, I'll end on that one, although I'm sure it's not the end of the story. All right. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to Dr. Jo Boaler, and we'll see you next time.